Introduction by Robert G. Mondavi

Prologue

Was there ever a better job! In the mid-1970s, I was a correspondent for Time magazine in Paris. It was a small office, so I got to write stories on subjects as varied as French politics and haute couture. When a big story broke in one of the countries under the Paris bureau, I jetted off to Madrid to cover the assassination of a Spanish Prime Minister, to Lisbon to report on a revolution taking place, or to Amsterdam to check into a bribery scandal involving the Dutch Queen's husband.

On May 24, 1976, I happened to be in Paris. The previous week I had suggested to editors in New York a story on a wine tasting that was doing the unthinkable: comparing some of the greatest names in French wines with new and little known California wines. It seemed like a non-event-clearly France would win-but as a native Californian, I had developed an interest in wine and had tried to learn something about European wines while studying or working in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and, of course, France. Each week Time correspondents around the world suggest hundreds of stories. Only a few of the proposals are scheduled and even fewer ever make it to press. It's a fierce survival-of-the-fittest process, but the result is a lively, compelling publication. Although my story was scheduled, I knew that the odds of it getting into the magazine were long. If, as expected, the French wines won, there would be no story. But you never know, and a wine tasting-where maybe I'd get a chance to try a few of the wines myself-seemed, at the very least, like a perfectly wonderful way to spend an otherwise slow afternoon.

The event was taking place at the Inter-Continental Hotel, not far from the Time office just off the Champs-Élysées. In winter I might have taken the Métro there, but it was a beautiful spring day, so instead I walked through the immaculate gardens lining the grand boulevard toward the Place de la Concorde. I considered this the most beautiful part of the world's most beautiful city. There were monumental buildings, elegant people and an exciting hustle and bustle. This was the epicenter of the city Gershwin put to music in An American in Paris. I strolled past the American embassy and the Egyptian obelisk nicknamed Cleopatra's Needle in the Place de La Concorde to the Rue de Rivoli, and then under its arcades lined with fashionable shops displaying their wares. The Inter-Continental, located on the Rue de Castiglione and bordered by the Rue de Rivoli and the majestic Place Vendôme, was one of the most fashionable hotels in Paris. It reeked of class and luxury.

A hotel doorman directed me to the small, elegant room off the hotel's patio bar where the tasting was to take place. As I entered, waiters in tuxedoes were busily setting up the event, laying out tablecloths and distributing glasses. I knew the organizers of the tasting, Englishman Steven Spurrier, who owned a nearby wine shop called the Caves de la Madeleine, and his sidekick Patricia Gallagher, an American. I had taken an introductory wine course taught by Gallagher at the Académie du Vin, a wine school associated with the shop. Her personal plea was one of the reasons I agreed to cover the tasting, which was designed to garner some publicity for the shop and school, but they were having a hard time getting any publications to take it seriously. In fact, I was the only journalist who showed up. After saying hello to Gallagher, I started taking notes in the brown, plastic-covered book that I always carried with me. Soon the nine judges began arriving. I knew none of them personally, but they had impeccable credentials and were among the leading wine experts in France. With the quiet formalism of the French establishment, the judges greeted each other with a handshake and then took their places along the long bank of tables.

As this was going to be a blind tasting, meaning the labels of the wines would not be shown, the judges would not know which wines they were drinking. They knew only that the wines were from France and California and that the red wines were Bordeaux-style Cabernet Sauvignons and the whites were Burgundy-style Chardonnay. Shortly after 3:00 p.m., a waiter began walking up and down a row of tables pouring wine from unmarked bottles. The judges had nothing in front of them except a score card, two glasses and a petit pain, a small hard roll for nibbling on to clean the palate between wines. As is common in a wine tasting, the judges started with the white wines.

It was a very informal event, so I was free to roam around the room as the judges tasted the wines. They were a little chattier than is normal at a tasting, where the experts usually quietly concentrate on the work at hand.

About halfway through the white wine part of the competition, I began to notice something quite shocking. The judges were getting confused! They were identifying a French wine as a California one and vice versa. Judges at one end of the tables were insisting a particular wine was French, while those at the other were saying it was from California.

Raymond Oliver, the owner and chef of the Grand Véfour restaurant in Paris, one of the temples of French haute cuisine, swirled a white wine in his glass, held it up to the light to examine the pale straw color, smelled it and then tasted it. After a pause he said, “Ah, back to France!” I checked my list of wines twice to be sure, but Oliver had in fact just tasted a 1972 Freemark Abbey Chardonnay from California's Napa Valley! Soon after, Claude Dubois-Millot of GaultMillau, a publisher of French food and wine books and magazines, tasted another white wine and said with great confidence, “That is definitely California. It has no nose.” But the wine was really a 1973 Bâtard-Montrachet Ramonet-Prudhon, one of Burgundy's finest products.

Spurrier's Paris tasting might just be an interesting story after all.

Introduction for George M. Taber's “Judgment of Paris”

By Robert G. Mondavi

It was 100 years ago that my father came to this country and began to make wine here. And it was just 30 years ago that the Judgment of Paris took place. I like to think about the advances we made over the two generations until that tasting took place, and about the progress we've made since.

I always knew we had the soil, the climate and the grape varieties to make wines in the Napa Valley that could rank with the great wines of the world. At that time, we did not have the knowledge of how to accomplish our goals, but I knew we had to begin. It was my pleasure to have worked with Mike Grgich and Warren Winiarski, who are the real heroes of this book. They were certainly more adept than I, but I like to think that they grasped my vision of what could be done in the Valley, and I know we worked and planned and dreamed together that a day like that bicentennial event in 1976 could occur.

It was also a pleasure to meet Steven Spurrier, and later his associate, Patricia Gallagher, here at the winery. Believe me…there were not a great number of believers in those days and we prized every one. In London we had a few people who knew what we were doing-Hugh Johnson, Michael Broadbent and Harry Waugh-but until Steven we had no one in France. It was a real treat to go to Cité Berryer and see California wines at the Caves de la Madeleine!

I'm certainly happy to see that George Taber-who was there-decided to write the true story of the momentous event. So much of the California wine history has been lost, and as he points out, the dramatic tasting sent shock waves all around the world. Although our wines were not in the tasting, it appeared at the time that we gained quite as much as our colleagues. It truly was a victory for our Napa Valley wines, California wines and in fact, winemaking in North America. It gave us the confidence to continue what we were doing-confidence in our commitment to excel. This is a book for every wine lover; it has a history and a very exciting story well told. And we won!